Concrete cloth and concrete canvas has become increasingly popular to lay on sloped ground surfaces in the water and in other hard to reach places. Concrete cloth is generally a cement impregnated fabric that is laid on a ground surface and becomes hardened after being wetted in place.
Currently several types of mechanical fasteners have been used to mount the concrete cloth in place, such as stapes, nails screws, hot rings, staking or pining or burying edges of the cloth.
However, each of the mechanical fasteners can be labor intensive and require substantial time and cost to be used. The typical mechanical fasteners such as the staples and nails have to be pounded in place which is not desirable over large spans.
Hot rings are generally used to fasten the concrete cloth to adjacent cloth or require the cloth to be attached to underlying mesh substrates, and also can be labor and material intensive.
While screws can be fastened using a power screw driver, the Philips or regular screw heads can be difficult to mount especially when large numbers of screws may be needed to fasten down large sections of concrete cloth. cannot be easily drilled into place
Stakes and pinning are inserted into ground surfaces, but require each one be separately mounted which is also labor and material intensive. Additionally, the top ends of the stakes remain and protrude upward from the concrete cloth, which is also undesirable.
The assignees of the subject invention have been marketing the DRILL TIE® which is a drill adaptable spike type fastener for various construction projects, in concrete forming applications such as forming tie beam headers and columns. However, the conventional DRILL TIE® products are not able to be used for other applications such as for fastening sheet material used in concrete cloth applications and landscape and erosion control applications.
Many other types of fasteners have been proposed over the years but also fail to be both easily adaptable and economically feasible for concrete cloth applications and landscape and erosion control applications. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,233,889 to Husley; U.S. Pat. No. 5,788,444 to Losada; U.S. Pat. No. 5,755,545 to Banks; U.S. Pat. No. 5,564,232 to Callaway; U.S. Pat. No. 5,449,139 to Herelier; U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,495 to Braun; U.S. Pat. No. 3,877,340 to Knohl; U.S. Pat. No. 3,870,428 to Jackson; U.S. Pat. No. 3,237,904 to Abruzese; U.S. Pat. No. 2,913,204 to Stewart; U.S. Pat. No. 2,840,092 to Hill; U.S. Pat. No. 1,767,565 to Thrift; U.S. Pat. No. 1,497,859 to Lilly; U.S. Pat. No. 1,144,700 to Edwards; U.S. Pat. No. 970,423 to Cunningham; and U.S. Pat. No. 746,006 to Brigham.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.